[mc25a]

I've been intrigued by these pull behind gang reels for several years now. There are a few reviews out there but nothing really in detail and nothing I can find about how they hold up over the years.

One thing I've noticed is that the units with very poor reviews are generally the cheaper reels. The FLEX 58 and up (gold series reels) get fair to good reviews and seem a lot heavier duty.

I have a new (last year) Walker zero turn I could probably get 5k for and thought about the FLEX58 model from promow. It is about $1600 and they claim is not expandable, but I think anyone with any fabrication skills at all could figure out a way to add a couple reels if they wanted to go bigger.

I'm particularly interested for a couple reasons. One is my allergies are terrible with that dust blowing up in my face and it sure would be nice to have all that behind me. The other is I have low hanging fruit trees so mowing under without driving under would be nice too. My Walker is actually quite good for that too with it's out-front deck.

I had another idea just to buy two reels and mount them to each side of my cub 86 (probably to the back) to be used in conjunction with the 38" deck. So probably another 36" of cutting width considering overlap. Having some means to fold them up would allow me to just use the deck for rougher sections of lawn. I'm just not sure how the reel would do that was on the side of the rotary mower's discharge.

Third idea, no deck, building a lifting mechanism for the reels from the mid-mount deck carriage and a third in the middle rear attached to the sleeve hitch. This way I could readily lift the entire apparatus for crossing the gravel drive. This would probably cut better than pulling them because they would cut before the rear tires ran over the grass.

Anyway, just some ideas I've been kicking around. I know the reels require more maintenance and a smoother, cleaner yard.